Chapter 9
If the national security apparatus could not constrain President Trump, neither would it go down without a struggle. Trump had the power of the presidency; his bureaucratic opponents, the weapon of the leak. No administration ever has been so perforated by leaks as Donald Trump’s. As the joke went, it fell to Donald Trump to deliver on Barack Obama’s promise of “the most transparent administration ever.”
Those leaks thwarted many of the worst impulses of the new Trump administration. Leaks swiftly removed from office Trump’s profoundly compromised first choice for national security adviser, Michael Flynn. Leaks alerted the world that President Trump had blabbed a crucial military secret to the Russian foreign minister. Leaks deterred the Trump administration from lifting sanctions on Russia as soon as it entered office, as Michael Isikoff reported for Yahoo News in June 2017:
In the early weeks of the Trump administration, former Obama administration officials and State Department staffers fought an intense, behind-the-scenes battle to head off efforts by incoming officials to normalize relations with Russia, according to multiple sources familiar with the events.
Unknown to the public at the time, top Trump administration officials, almost as soon as they took office, tasked State Department staffers with developing proposals for the lifting of economic sanctions, the return of diplomatic compounds and other steps to relieve tensions with Moscow.
These efforts to relax or remove punitive measures imposed by President Obama in retaliation for Russia’s intervention in Ukraine and meddling in the 2016 election alarmed some State Department officials, who immediately began lobbying congressional leaders to quickly pass legislation to block the move, the sources said.1
Yet the same leaks that thwarted Trump’s pro-Putin agenda also exacted a heavy price. Those leaks revealed US surveillance capabilities in a way that compromised national security. For example, Greg Miller, Adam Entous, and Ellen Nakashima broke the news in the February 9, 2017, Washington Post that Flynn had lied when he denied speaking to Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak about sanctions relief.
Nine current and former officials, who were in senior positions at multiple agencies at the time of the calls, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.
All of those officials said Flynn’s references to the election-related sanctions were explicit. Two of those officials went further, saying that Flynn urged Russia not to overreact to the penalties being imposed by President Barack Obama, making clear that the two sides would be in position to review the matter after Trump was sworn in as president.
“Kislyak was left with the impression that the sanctions would be revisited at a later time,” said a former official.2
Kislyak, being no novice and no fool, would have conducted his conversation with Flynn by some modality he regarded as safe from American surveillance. In order to expose Flynn’s lie, the nine officials who talked to the Post also revealed to the Russians that the United States had cracked a link that Russian intelligence operatives had regarded as secure.
It had to be assumed that the Russian embassy would immediately alter its communications methods, denying the United States future information flows, at least for some period of time. To protect the United States from a compromised national security adviser, nine senior intelligence officials agreed to burn an important American national secret.
Such trade-offs would occur again and again.
As noted in the previous chapter, Trump blurted an important secret to Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov in the Oval Office on May 10, 2017. Trump’s boastful blabber mouthery was bad for many reasons, but on its own, the blurt may have done only limited harm. The secret purportedly exposed an Israeli penetration of ISIS communications. The Russians might have shared that information with their clients inside Syria and their partners in Iran. But would any of those actors—Russia, Iran, or the Assad regime—have shared the information with ISIS? Perhaps ISIS in turn has penetrated the Assad regime. Still, all those risks were more roundabout than what happened next: the possible divulgence of the substance of the secret to the news media by disgusted national security professionals. (I’ve used hedged language here because it is not impossible that the secondary round of leaks consisted of deliberate disinformation from national security professionals, frantically trying to minimize the harm of the president’s mistake.)
Even if the round-two leaks were disinformation, however, the revelation, as legitimately public spirited as it was, inflicted yet another harm. A president—any president—would normally expect his staff to protect the confidentiality of his deliberations, including the inevitable mistakes that any human being will make: the goofs, gaffes, grievances, lapses of memory, political incorrectnesses, and remarks-best-not-repeated-outside-this-room that have echoed off the walls of government ever since those walls were erected.
Donald Trump says more things that should not be said than any president in American history. But also more than any president in history, he works in an office he cannot trust and knows he cannot trust. Donald Trump may not be a proper president, or a competent president, or a patriotic president, or even a legitimate president in any larger ethical sense of the word “legitimate.” But he is the lawful president, charged with public functions. In order to stop him from betraying his office and the country, the professionals around him have also effectively prevented him from fulfilling his office and serving his country, supposing he were ever minded to do that. He must do his job, however he conceives that job, within a narrow ambit of relatives and cronies, selected mostly for their negative qualities: their lack of knowledge, their lack of experience, their lack of independence, their lack of integrity. The dysfunction inside the White House is Trump’s fault, but it is not only Trump’s problem.
The executive office of the president has until now almost always been staffed by committed people who take their jobs highly seriously. There are few slackers at a White House. The smallest jobs must be done with the greatest care; a future election can turn on whether the president has offended a local notable by mispronouncing her husband’s name.
The Trump White House is a mess of careless slobs. At the highest levels, one sees mutual sabotage, easily decoded “on background” name-calling, false filings of disclosure documents, and institutionalized lying about readily ascertainable facts. The failure of leadership at the top contaminates the whole enterprise. Even the most routine work product of the Trump White House is strewn with errors of spelling, fact, and protocol, sometimes of quite serious consequence. Daniel Dale of the Toronto Star compiled a list of some thirty such goofs. The funniest was perhaps a July 12, 2017, release attacking the accuracy of the Congressional Budget Office that misspelled the word “inaccurately” as “innacurately.” The most serious was a July 8 reference to China’s Xi Jinping as “president of the Republic of China”—the Republic of China being the official name of Taiwan, of course. Along the way, the Trump White House misspelled not only the names of many of its own newly appointed officials, but also that of the prime minister of Great Britain.3 In a prime-time television address in August 2017 about his decision to escalate the US commitment to Afghanistan, President Trump described that country’s prime minister as its president. More bafflingly, on October 1, 2017, the official spokesperson for the Department of State assured the world via Twitter that North Korea would never attain the “nuclear capability” it had in fact attained in 2006.4
At best, the dysfunction of the Trump team has actively advanced the public interest, by unintentionally thwarting the Trump administration’s more sinister instincts. But at worst, the casual incompetence has risked authentic harm. During the visit of Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe to the United States in February 2017, Trump received word of a North Korean missile test while dining on the patio at his Mar-a-Lago club. Rather than withdraw into the secure communications area established for a president wherever he may go, Trump read a report on the situation on the spot, illuminating his reading by the light of aides’ cell phones—a shocking security breach. Because mobile phones can so easily be hacked and converted into spy cameras, it’s not permitted even to bring them into a secure facility, much less to point them at a sensitive document. Not only did Trump ignore that rule, so did the half dozen aides who crowded around him in the photographs snapped by other diners and posted on Facebook.5 By the time of the May meeting with Lavrov, these egregious departures from basic operational security had been curbed, to the public benefit.
If Trump were not so locked into a tiny circle by his distrust of outsiders, his handling of health care reform might also have amounted to less of a fiasco. Trump started as something like a moderate on the health care issue. He has praised the universal systems of Canada and the United Kingdom, promised broader coverage, and defended Medicaid against criticism from the congressional party. It’s easily imaginable that a more professional policy process inside the White House would have enabled him to triangulate against both congressional Democrats and Republicans, arriving at a position broadly acceptable to much of public opinion. Given Trump’s extreme ignorance of health care issues, however, such a plan would require bringing aboard some authentic nonpartisan experts who could draft a policy consistent with Trump’s own surprisingly generous instincts on the issue. But by the time the health care debate was reaching its peak, FBI director Comey had been fired, a special counsel, Robert Mueller, had been appointed, and the Trump White House had immured itself for siege. Welcoming somebody with no special loyalty to Trump into the council of such an embattled president: impossible and unthinkable. This enabled the do-or-die House Republicans under Speaker Ryan to hornswoggle a president with no particular commitment to their ideology into subscribing to the most crushingly unpopular item on their agenda.
The pattern would repeat itself on tax reform. Trump allowed congressional Republicans to write a tax plan that delivered little or nothing to his own constituencies within the party. Trump relied heavily for advice on a treasury secretary so politically tone-deaf that he had sought a government plane to transport him around Europe on a three-week honeymoon. A more modest revision of the notorious inefficiency of the corporate income tax might well have gained bipartisan support: John Kerry had endorsed corporate-tax reform in 2004. Instead, Trump committed himself to yet another shove-it-through plan that left him hostage to any three nervous Republican senators.
I am not suggesting here that Trump was a victim of anything or anyone other than himself. There were sound reasons for professionals of all kinds to keep a far distance from the Trump White House. Some forty people were indicted as a result of the Watergate scandal. Among those sentenced to prison: the attorney general of the United States, the White House counsel, and President Nixon’s two most senior White House aides. A dozen men were convicted or pleaded guilty to a range of charges after the Iran-Contra affair. White Houses can be dangerous places under leadership that does not respect the law. Official lying is usually unethical, but not always illegal—until suddenly the official is called before a congressional committee or federal investigation. Then he or she must choose either to confess the lie or repeat it under oath. The terms of service in the Trump White House were not only dishonorable and humiliating, but also dangerous. People with sense and people with options preferred to stay away.
Trump’s abuse of the power of the presidency invited reciprocal abuses by members of other branches of government.
When President Trump banned travelers from certain Muslim-majority nations from entering the United States, he was exercising a lawful power of his office. It’s well-established law that the president has power to bar “any class of aliens” both as immigrants and as nonimmigrants and to impose on their ordinary comings and goings “any restrictions he may deem appropriate.”6
Some argued that Trump violated the Constitution by imposing a restriction that disadvantaged adherents of one religion from traveling to the United States. But the Constitution applies only to Americans. The Supreme Court ruled as recently as 2015 that the president could deny a visa to an alien for no stated reason at all! Aliens have no due process rights against the United States, and no First Amendment rights against the United States.7
Yet the courts have shredded Trump’s travel ban anyway. In the words of the first of a series of federal judges to rule against the Trump administration: the courts could not overlook “significant and unrebutted evidence of religious animus driving the promulgation of the Executive Order and its related predecessor.”8
To amend an old saying: Bad presidents make bad law. Because President Trump behaved in what the courts regarded as a wrongful way, the courts responded in ways they would have regarded as wrongful only twelve months before. For it was not only one judge in Hawaii who stripped Trump of previous presidential powers; the travel ban litigation would snake its way through the Ninth Circuit to the Supreme Court, the Trump administration losing at almost every step of the way. (In July 2017, the Supreme Court would uphold the administration’s rights to reduce the intake of previously accepted refugees.9)
In the travel ban litigation, the courts asserted a new power to disregard long-established and long-accepted formal law if the president’s personal words created a basis for mistrusting his motives. In response to the danger posed by Trump, other holders of American power are tempted to jettison their historic role too, and to use any tool at hand, no matter how doubtfully legitimate, to stop him. In order to save the constitutional system, its defenders are at risk of corroding it.
Nowhere is that risk more acute than in the realm of civilian-military relations—and from two directions.
The first directional risk is the movement of the military into government. Barack Obama appointed one former general, Eric Shinseki, to his cabinet, to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs, and another, David Petraeus, to head the Central Intelligence Agency. George W. Bush appointed some as well, including Colin Powell as secretary of state. Bill Clinton appointed a general, Barry McCaffrey, as director of the office of drug control policy, and an admiral, William J. Crowe, as his first ambassador to the United Kingdom. Retired and active generals have more than once held the job of national security adviser: Brent Scowcroft under George H. W. Bush; Colin Powell under Ronald Reagan.
Never before, however, had a president concentrated anything near so much power in former military hands as Donald Trump did. The National Security Act of 1947 expressly forbids active or recently retired generals from serving as the secretary of defense. The ban was waived only once before, in September 1950, to permit George C. Marshall to reorganize the US armed forces, which were demoralized after their humiliating retreat down the Korean Peninsula. No such emergency existed in 2017, but Trump asked for and got a second waiver to appoint James Mattis as secretary of defense.
Trump appointed the retired general John Kelly as Homeland Security secretary and his ally, the retired general Michael Flynn, as national security adviser. When Flynn was forced to resign, Trump offered the post to a retired admiral, Bob Harward. Harward declined because Trump would not allow him to remove Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner from the NSC principals’ committee. Trump next turned to General H. R. McMaster, who as an active-duty officer could not refuse. Another general, Keith Kellogg, was awkwardly inserted alongside the “No, I won’t go” K. T. McFarland as a second deputy national security adviser. John Kelly would replace Reince Priebus as White House chief of staff on July 28, 2017. President Trump even appointed a former general to head the federal bureau of prisons.10
These are all honorable and capable men. The United States is lucky to have their service. But it’s unprecedented and troubling to concentrate so many former military people into any administration. In this administration, the concentration sounds even louder warnings. The nongenerals in high office in the Trump administration were a worryingly weak group. Chris Ruddy, the CEO of Newsmax, emerged from a February 2017 visit with the president to disparage Chief of Staff Priebus to the Washington Post:
I think on paper Reince looked good as the chief of staff—and Donald trusted him—but it’s pretty clear the guy is in way over his head. He’s not knowledgeable of how federal agencies work, how the communications operations work.11
Trump’s standing secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, was weakened by a troubling Russia history of his own. In July 2017, the US Treasury Department issued a stinging assessment of Tillerson’s former employer: “Exxon Mobil demonstrated reckless disregard for U.S. sanctions requirements. Exxon Mobil caused significant harm to the Ukraine-related sanctions program.”12 In light of the severity of those words, the comparatively light fine of $2 million raised yet more questions about Tillerson’s role inside government and out. Even without that backstory, Tillerson would have been diminished by President Trump’s evident disregard for him and his own systematic deconstruction of the department he headed. As late as midsummer 2017, the Trump administration had not submitted nominations for the assistant secretaryships of Eurasian and East Asian affairs; for Near Eastern or African affairs; for chief of protocol, for chief counselor, or for its top counterterrorism and nonproliferation jobs.13 Despite crises in Spain and South Korea, the United States had no ambassador in either country as of October 1, 2017. There was not even a State–White House liaison—which may explain how nobody noticed that “Republic of China” mistake.14
In a government so weak and mismanaged, the competence of its former military personnel exerted even more gravity than otherwise. Which might have been a mercy—who wouldn’t prefer that the United States be led by James Mattis than Donald Trump?—but for this fact: Military men, like people trained to any demanding specialty, acquire certain habits of mind, certain ways of looking at the world. Within a well-functioning administration, this perspective is enriching; within an administration like Donald Trump’s, it can be supremely dangerous.
High among those dangers is impatience with law. Military people are selected, trained, and promoted to get results. There are no wrong ways to win a battle, after all. Procedures and protocols are all very well in their way, but to the military mind they never can be, and never should be, ends in themselves. Nobody should want to change that outlook! But that outlook, good in its place, must always be balanced in a republic of laws by the lawyer’s insistence on the supremacy of legality. The most wrenching post-Watergate scandal—Iran-Contra—was the work of three military men who refused to heed this insistence: John Poindexter, Bud McFarlane, and Oliver North. Unlike the Watergate burglars, these men aimed only at the public good as they understood it. To the extent that the trammels of the law impeded them, they sliced through them as so much irritating and unnecessary red tape. Under a president who despises law even more than the most impatient general, a general’s instincts become even more dangerous to him, to the government, and to the nation.
Vice President Pence enjoined the 2017 graduating class at the US Naval Academy to “follow the chain of command without exception. Submit yourselves, as the saying goes, to the authorities that have been placed above you. Trust your superiors, trust your orders, and you’ll serve and lead well.”15 But that is not the American way. American officers are bound to obey only lawful orders. The unthinking obedience recommended by the vice president is the mentality of authoritarian states, not rule-of-law societies. Ten years after the ratification of the Constitution, the US Supreme Court rejected forever the “I was just following orders” defense. Instructions from a superior officer “cannot change the nature of the transaction, or legalize an act which without those instructions would have been a plain trespass.”16
Most American officers do understand and will comply with that principle—which leads to the second directional risk to civilian-military relations under President Trump: the risk that the military will quietly cut an unfit president out of the chain of command.
How much does the military now tell President Trump about what it is doing, and how exactly does it follow his orders, to the extent he issues orders? In crisis zones from Syria to North Korea, the military seems to be operating with unprecedented autonomy. President Trump has delegated to his secretary of defense the authority to set troop levels in Afghanistan.17 The April 2017 decision to drop America’s most powerful nonnuclear bomb on an ISIS compound in eastern Afghanistan was taken by the theater commander, General John Nicholson, without approval even by the secretary of defense, according to a report by Dexter Filkins in the New Yorker.18 As we have already observed, the president was for days on end wholly unaware not only of the location, but even of the direction of navigation of the Carl Vinson carrier group.
No paper record has ever been found, but some historians of the Watergate period believe that as Richard Nixon’s personality dissolved, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger ordered the Joint Chiefs of Staff to ignore any presidential directive unless also approved by him. Is anything like that happening now? How would we know? When would we know?
That “fire and fury” threat from Donald Trump—look at what happened next. Trump clearly intended it; he repeated it twice. Yet within hours, it had been disavowed by almost every other branch of the US government.
Josh Dawsey of Politico tweeted the next day:
“Fire and fury” from yesterday was not carefully vetted language from Trump, per several ppl with knowledge. “Don’t read too much into it.”19
Secretary of State Tillerson also pooh-poohed the president’s words, saying, “Nothing that I have seen and nothing that I know of would indicate that the situation has dramatically changed in the last twenty-four hours. Americans should sleep well at night.”20
The final and definitive word, however, was issued as a formal written statement by Defense Secretary Mattis two days after President Trump’s outburst.
The United States and our allies have the demonstrated capabilities and unquestionable commitment to defend ourselves from an attack. Kim Jong Un should take heed of the United Nations Security Council’s unified voice, and statements from governments the world over, who agree the DPRK poses a threat to global security and stability. The DPRK must choose to stop isolating itself and stand down its pursuit of nuclear weapons. The DPRK should cease any consideration of actions that would lead to the end of its regime and the destruction of its people.
President Trump was informed of the growing threat last December and on taking office his first orders to me emphasized the readiness of our ballistic missile defense and nuclear deterrent forces. While our State Department is making every effort to resolve this global threat through diplomatic means, it must be noted that the combined allied militaries now possess the most precise, rehearsed and robust defensive and offensive capabilities on Earth. The DPRK regime’s actions will continue to be grossly overmatched by ours and would lose any arms race or conflict it initiates.21
The statement stressed that war would come only if North Korea initiated it.
These were saner words than those mouthed by the president. But what has happened to the United States when a president—even a reckless and foolish president—is overruled by his military, even a military led by a secretary as wise as James Mattis?
Mattis’s own low personal regard for President Trump accidentally became public when video emerged of Mattis in a small-group conversation with military personnel in Jordan. After praising them, the defense secretary added, “You’re a great example for our country right now. It’s got some problems. You know it, and I know it. It’s got problems that we don’t have in the military. You just hold the line, my fine young soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines. You just hold the line until our country gets back to understanding and respecting each other, and showing it—of being friendly to one another, of understanding what Americans owe to one another. . . . We’ve got two powers: the power of inspiration—and you’ll get the inspiration back—and the power of intimidation, and that’s you.”22
Hotheads and janissaries seldom rise to the highest ranks of the US armed forces. Men like Mattis and Kelly and McMaster have demonstrated an appreciation of and a commitment to liberal democracy exceeding that of their civilian commander in chief. Yet the principle of civilian supremacy remains indispensable even when the civilian in question has revealed himself as unfit for office. His abuses of power are for the president’s fellow civilians to check, correct, and punish through the civilian processes laid down by law. The habits of military disobedience (or non-obedience), however sympathetic their origin, can quickly mutate into a chronic hazard to the state and the Constitution.
As Donald Trump settled into office, an American armored brigade was deploying in Poland, part of a repositioning of NATO forces that based a British-led force in Estonia, a Canadian-led force in Latvia, and a German-led force in Lithuania. The American force’s new home is the town of Zagan, only twenty-five miles east of the German border—about the most cautious possible move into Poland without altogether abandoning the idea. Still, there they are, facing a much bigger and more rapid Russian buildup to the north and east. A soldier or officer assigned to that duty—and their families back in the United States—must wonder about the integrity of the orders that could issue from a Russia-compromised president of the United States. If they should be called on to risk their lives to serve their country, will they wonder which country their Putin-infatuated commander in chief is ultimately serving?
It’s a terrible question for a patriotic soldier, a terrible dilemma for those who bear intermediate commands between the fighting troops and that compromised president. Twice in the debates of the Philadelphia convention of 1787, a delegate raised the precedent of Charles II, the king of Great Britain from 1660 to 1685, and thus then the king of America too. Charles had accepted bribes from Louis XIV to sway British foreign policy. Could such temptation come the way of an American president? Charles Cotesworth Pinckney argued that it could: “His office is not to be permanent, but temporary; and he might receive a bribe which would enable him to live in greater splendor in another country than his own.”23 Against this risk, answered Gouverneur Morris, stood the remedy of impeachment. “No one would say that we ought to expose ourselves to the danger of seeing the first Magistrate in foreign pay without being able to guard [against] it by displacing him.”24
Yet in important ways, President Trump already is being displaced—first by his own disavowal of ordinary responsibility, then by the countermeasures being put in place against him by the national security agencies. Perhaps everything will return to normal when and if Donald Trump departs the scene. But perhaps it will not.
In national security—as with ethics in government more generally—what is usually meant by the word “normal” is the norm that prevailed from Watergate to 9/11: national security operations closely monitored by both the executive branch and Congress. Yet there have been other “normal.” From Pearl Harbor until the scandals of the mid-1970s, the president often knew little—and Congress often knew nothing—about what the national security agencies were doing. Since 9/11, some of those old habits have revived, and in the Trump years they may became fully animated. National security professionals do not always trust the competence, commitment, and integrity of their political counterparts, and in the first year of the Trump presidency, those professionals have been given abundant reasons for that distrust. Will they post-Trump revert to their pre-Trump—really pre-9/11—form? What if the next president also looks like an outlier from the point of view of the Department of Defense, the CIA, and the NSA? Will the national security agencies respect a future president of the radical Left any more than they respect a President Trump? It is not only the ethno-nationalist Right that rejects the civic patriotic values the national security agencies uphold. Bureaucracies always yearn to escape political control, and the national security agencies are the most powerful, autonomous, and well-funded bureaucracies within the American state. Trump has given them powerful and righteous motives to emancipate themselves. Will they ever again fully resume the subordination that may feel by the 2020s like a relic from a bygone era?